I.
The first time you notice, you are pressed against him on the couch. The two of you hold a single controller between you, him with the left half and you with the right. You’re playing Mario Kart with your friends, and neither of you expects to do well. He is steering, and all you have to do is hold down the “go” button, but you’re sure your bad luck will carry over regardless. Miraculously, you do well, managing even to beat some of your friends. He high-fives you, giddy with your success, and the two of you are grinning like idiots. You watch him light-heartedly taunt your friends, and something in your chest stirs.
Oh, you think. Oh no.
II.
It’s nearly midnight by the time you pile into the rickety Honda. With all five of you in the car, the suspension swings dangerously to the right every time you go over a bump. The parking lot of the 24-hour McDonald’s is all but empty as you pull up to the drive-through menu. You order three 20-piece servings of chicken nuggets and two large fries.
As you drive to the pick-up window, he turns to you, eyes wide with fear and awe. “That’s so many nuggets.”
"Yeah,” you say. “60 nuggets.”
"60 nuggets. That’s like a whole chicken!” You smile at him and take the bag that the employee is holding out to you.
Back at the apartment, someone suggests watching The Room. It’s a terrible idea and you all know it, but you put it on anyways. You’re sitting closer to him than is strictly necessary, but no one seems to notice or care. You let yourself enjoy his warmth and the way his arm presses against yours. His scent is intoxicating, a mix of soap and something warm. Maybe you imagine it, but you think you feel him leaning into you, and it’s all you can focus on.
The movie is awful, with bad writing and worse acting, but you all enjoy laughing at the characters and plot holes and endlessly cyclical storyline. At some point, you end up leaning against him. You rest your head on his shoulder and he leans his head against yours. You stay there for the rest of the night and pray no one else can hear the way your heart is fluttering against your ribs.
III.
You meet at a restaurant on a Wednesday, ostensibly to work on a project. He’s already at a table when you get there, so you join him. The restaurant is loud and crowded, but he’s found a little high-top near the back. As you sit down across from him, the ambient music and the voices of the other people seem to fade out, and all you can focus on is him. You had always thought people were exaggerating when they said something like that, but now you believe it. The two of you compare what you’ve got so far, and try to be productive, but a comment he makes reminds you of a story that you have to tell him. Suddenly an hour has passed and you’ve made no progress at all. Despite the impending deadline and your struggles with one-on-one conversations, there’s a lightness in your chest that wasn’t there when you left your room. He has a class and you have to study, so you agree to meet later. You can feel yourself smiling ridiculously your whole walk home, but you can’t bring yourself to care.
IV.
You tell your friend about him because you just can’t stand to keep it to yourself any longer. It still scares you to say it out loud, so you tell them over text instead of during your Skype call. You tell them about your text conversations with him, about how he stops what he’s doing to send you pictures of animals he sees, about how you’re still ridiculously awkward talking to him. Their smile comes through in the emojis and exclamation marks that litter their texts, and you realize how lucky you are to have a friend like them. You’re not sure if you wanted advice or just someone to listen to you talk about your crush, but the conversation reassures you nonetheless.
V.
The four of you link hands, forming a chain so as not to lose each other on your way out of the concert. You’re at the end, clinging to his hand against the press of the crowd. Once you reach the parking lot, he holds on for an extra moment, so short you think you might have imagined it. You slide into the back seat of the car and he sits across from you. When you’re not looking, he takes your hand in his again and squeezes. You turn to look at him and he’s staring at you, a soft smile on his lips.
In the front seat, your friend puts on some music that you all know, and the four of you sing along even though your voices are nearly blown after three hours of screaming. He holds your hand through the whole ride, even raising it to his lips and kissing it once. You can’t believe your life is like this; you have amazing friends, you got to see one of your favorite artists live, and you’re holding hands with a boy who likes you back. You think this is the happiest you’ve been in a while.
VI.
He walks you home from your friend’s apartment after a long night of watching YouTube videos and playing board games. You spend much of the half hour walk in conversation, but sometimes you just let a comfortable silence rest between you. The city looks beautiful in the late-autumn night, so you take a moment at the top of the hill to pause and look out at the lights beneath you. You use the chill of the night as an excuse to step closer to him, and he doesn’t move away. You continue to walk, but it isn’t until you’re nearly home that you work up the courage to take his hand. He smiles and squeezes your hand, and it makes you want to see him smile like that again and again.
The two of you stop outside your building, not letting go even though it’s time to say goodnight. You look at him, and you know he feels the same hesitant expectation that’s sitting heavily on your chest.
"Can I kiss you?” he asks softly, and you’re sure it’s the most nervous you’ve ever heard him sound. You just nod, unable to speak, but he moves closer anyways. It’s awkward and tentative, but you can’t stop smiling as you watch him leave. Your hands shake as you unlock the door and collapse onto your bed, filled with an uncontrollable giddiness. You think about his lips against yours until you fall asleep.
VII.
Your parents ask how you’re doing. You tell them what they want to hear: I’m good, having a lot of fun, doing well in class. You don’t say: I think I’m falling in love.

note: so this is mostly unedited, i'm sleep deprived, and just came up with this garbage five hours ago.... its probably terrible and messy and idk what it is but take it bc i haven't posted anything in forever // also sorry abt my lower case aesthetic it most definitely makes understanding this worse
note #2 because i wrote the first note at 1 am: I'm sorry if its a m ess ,, idk if i censored all the curses I'm so rry also the timeline is confusing but basically most of the events happen in his junior year but the present w the principal is in his senior year,,, thank you
he really didn’t intend for the week to turn out like this. he even shocked himself.
✩
the thing about lincoln was that he was… a little on the weaker side. he had bleached blonde hair and a terrifying glare but despite the nickname link, he wasn’t good with swords and wasn’t exactly cool. he couldn’t even memorize the gettysburg address. he tried to spell the nickname as linc for a couple days but soon everyone was calling him lints and it sounded a lot dopier than he already looked, so he changed it. when he finally played a zelda game, a breath of the wild at a party with friends, he made jokes about link’s figure and underwear (“i swear he’s at least 17 in this game”) until people started poking at him to take off his shirt to see if “he matched.” he had the blonde hair. he had the mini ponytail.
he didn’t take off his shirt then, but part of him kind of wanted to.
✩
the principle was sitting across from him. he wondered what she saw in the thin manila folder she was clutching in stony, probably cold hands. just another medium sized first gen chinese immigrant kid, probably, with straight A’s and applications sent to harvard and oxford and stanford? the only thing that really set him apart from his perfect brother was the hair.
people liked to comment about his hair.
✩
"why?” his mother asked when he came home with his hair a sudden shock of blonde.
"black isn’t my colour.” he’d responded.
"how much did you pay?”
"the thirty dollars ms. ‘ski gave me for mowing her lawn.”
"it’s mrs.” his mother corrected. “and her last name is sadinski. learn it.” lincoln didn’t say anything but his head was singing stupid stupid stupid because what did it matter, if the woman next door named marla sadinski was married? it really didn’t.
"someday i’m buying you majora’s mask.” was the first thing link’s best friend, mickey, had said.
"someday i’ll buy you a bicycle with your name on it.” mickey punched him lightly, then continued to do so after link singsonged micycle over and over, which was, very unfortunately, mickey’s full name.
link kept his roots though. he didn’t know if he meant it as metaphorically as he did physically - the dark brown of his hair remained, even if it was hugged by a yellow blonde. he grew it long, sometimes the strands tickled his cheeks when they were split in a smile after a long night of yelling with his friends over monopoly.
✩
"the colleges you’re applying too will have to be notified about this.” the principal says, finally, with a strangled sigh and a squint as if she’s trying to hide the displeasure of revealing a flaw in her tiled halls. link feels a sharp something in his gut, because she says this without hearing him out, hearing his side of the story. plus, he can just imagine the thin, information-less letters he’ll receive from the mail, which will reveal he’ll never be as good as his brother and reveal that he applied to the acting programs at every single college his mother made him apply to instead of the pre-med ones. link knows that even before his mother’s eyebrows will cinch in anger she’ll ask him if he’d rather wear dresses (but it always meant more than that) and he’ll have to lie and say no, mamma, i don’t, i just don’t like math as much as i like pretending i’m someone else. and it wasn’t like link would rather wear dresses, he just liked them and he looked good in them as he was so rudely awakened to the summer prior when mickey and their friends all thought it was a good idea to go shopping for formal wear. pepe, whose nickname was short for penelope and a “f*ck you to every white supremacist who thinks they can claim such a golden meme” had elbowed link and dared him to try on a dress. link was alarmingly good at taking dares in stride, and when he stalked out to do a twirl everyone just stared, stone still, because link was also alarmingly good looking in a dress. (and it never meant more than that.)
✩
link wore a skirt two weeks into the following school year, a yellow one that matched his hair and white pants that matched his white button up. his brother helped him pick it all out, helped him hide it from his mother. his brother, a much cooler senior walking into a high school building with his significantly less cooler brother under his arm, wearing a skirt, sent a bigger ripple through the kids their than link expected. not a wave, but still a ripple.
he wanted to wear it at his brother’s funeral, too, but life didn’t work like that.
✩
"but before that, i’d like you to explain.” finally. the principle asked. except that link didn’t really know how to explain. “we see behavior like this in children who have had a recent death in the family-” was that in the thin manila folder? “-but usually sooner. it’s been more than a year.” link’s knees pressed together through his tights. his principal didn’t mention the yellow skirt he was wearing.
"my brother used to call those ‘vanilla’ folders.” he said quietly, instead of explaining, because … well, because.
the principal gave him a look. link thumbed the ace bandages over his knuckles.
✩
pepe had told him he looked beautiful, that first day in the yellow skirt. she’d sat with her knees crossed and a bright orange folder in her lap with the homework she didn’t have enough time to do the night before and she’d looked up as he stood there, about to sit, and said it.
link couldn’t have kept standing, even if he wanted to.
✩
“you have really pretty eyes.” a girl, shorter than link by a good foot, said quietly as they walked slowly in the direction of the school’s exit. she had dark skin and too many freckles and her hair was coiled into to cute dark curls all around her face. they were both in ninth grade at the time, and lincoln did not know anything about this girl except that she was in his first period english class, her name was penelope, and that she was confusing him as to why she was telling him this. all of his question marks were italicized.
“you do, too.” he said instead of no one has ever told me that before, or why are they pretty? or something stupid like that. she blinked at this response, looked down, and then said:
“i’m wearing a jean skirt and a jean jacket as a joke today, this was the worst time to tell you anything.”
✩
“you’re wearing possibly the most beautiful red dress in existence, this is the perfect time to tell me something.”
“not when you’d wear it better than me!”
“red’s not my colour!”
“why am i even wearing this! i was going to show up as a frog!”
“pepe, this is the pre-halloween party.” mickey called from four feet away as he tore open a bag of chips, a full suit resting on his shoulders and over his chest. link wore something similar, plus an added bow in his hair, courtesy of marlow, a lanky boy who looked like he spent too much time on the beach and was very much in love with the world. they were waiting at his house, before they’d all go traipsing into the forest nearby in full formal attire like the hooligans they were.
“doesn’t matter! my entire character is a joke!” her hands were in the air, and despite the vague panic on her features she was stunning. she had gold on her eyelids.
“pepe, you look amazing, you chose your eyeshadow far too well because you have gold sparks in your eyes and they draw attention to it which is making you very extremely distracting so i swear to god please do not freak out and tell me what you need to tell me.”
her eyes got impossibly larger, which didn’t look as bad or bug-eyed as people make it seem, and said: “it’s just that... you also look very nice in skirt. or dress. and i brought an extra, but i realized too late that it’s not your size, and that’s why i was panicking, because i wanted to tell you but i also didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
something in link’s head pings. pepe is lying.
but it’s okay, because they walk arm in arm into the forest, like some vague life and death brigade party as their entire friend group pile into a small clearing lit by little jack o'lantern fairy lights and a small fire caged in stones, and pepe nervously tells him that she was going to say something else, which gets swallowed up pretty fast because they’re kissing each other before pepe really finishes her sentence about how golden link’s skin is and how no one had told her she had sparks in her eyes.
lucy, a small black haired girl who wore doc martens and vintage sweaters hollers and takes a polaroid of them (which is about as stalkerish as it sounds, both pepe and link tell her later) with the date - october 30th - scrawled in pen.
✩
link sees snow start to fall outside as the principle says, “lincoln, the only way you can redeem yourself is if you had a reason, a sensible one at that. neel thomas is a star player on the football team and well liked by students and teachers alike.” link scoffed. thomas was well liked by a certain kind of students and teachers. the kind who tried to shove link’s brother into the wall for existing but forgot that link’s brother was his own star, on the swimming team, and had significantly more muscle in his shoulders to pull himself to air than blubber that suffocated the opponents in a poorly strategized game.
“i had a very good reason.” he said mildly, staring into the white snow filling out the edges of the world, as it did in February. “but even i didn’t really think i was capable of getting angry.”
✩
“rosy.” he whispers. he’s in his yellow skirt, this time, the december air tossing it, hoping for a game. but it’s dark, and link is so so tired. the tears on his cheek are freezing. he kneels, doesn’t give a damn about his white tights in the dirt, touches his gloveless hands to the cold headstone. he was there earlier that day, in something more masculine, as the headstone was placed, the carving of roosevelt choi shining in the chilly sun. it was at least one in the morning now. it was the first time he snuck out. the first time link tried.
“rosy.” he says again, and he chokes, his other hand squeezing the thing box set on his lap. he sets his forehead on the gravestone, wishing his mind wasn’t freezing because of the cold but because his brother was there, he didn’t know, doing something. not being dead anymore.
he puts the thin box down, under the roses and daffodils and lilies. but he doesn’t leave. link is waiting for something now. for all the church visits, link doesn’t believe rose is in the afterlife. or anywhere, really. it hurts, but he knows he’s right. rose is gone.
he looks up, startled, when he hears footsteps. tall, a boy with a beautiful dark complection and curling black hair and teardrop shaped eyes stands a couple feet away. it takes him a second, but link understands.
“jamie?” he asked the wind. the kid nodded.
“link?” jamie questioned, so quiet link was afraid the cold would steal it. but he nodded.
jamie walked forward, slowly at first, but then he was there, and he and link were hugging, eyes becoming storm clouds as they sobbed into each other's jackets.
“you made him so happy.” link wobbled with his words. “he’d just… light up, when you were around, when we mentioned you.” something rolled through jamie’s body. a rack of something that emotion couldn’t really touch.
“you made him so proud.” was his response, and link’s world started to tumble.
✩
pepe’s hand was on his shoulder. she was crying too. he turned to her.
“one month?” she’d whispered. he’d nodded.
she held him, then. her dad was gone too. she knew.
for some reason, there was nothing more powerful than having someone hold him who knew.
✩
what hurt link the most was that he hadn’t known. it was a perfectly happy morning; he was used to his parents going to work early, or rose staying over at jamie’s. when his parents asked him to come to the hospital, he didn’t think about it.
but then his parents had explained. how roosevelt choi, nicknamed rose by his loved ones, had waiting outside of a convenience store staring at the sky because “if you try, you can still see the stars” and was rammed into the brick side of the building by a drunken mercedes driver.
link had sat so still, keeping his chest from moving. because they hadn’t announced his brother’s status yet. he was alive when they rolled him in. his jaw was still working when he whispered to the attendants that he loved his best friend, that his best friend loved him back, and that his brother was so so brave and if he could just stay alive for a little longer because he really needs to tell them both that he loved them and they could take over the world if they wanted to. they’d told him to breath, keep talking, because his head was untouched but everything was … everything else was …
apparently roosevelt choi’s last words were, “i need my brother and my boyfriend to know that they are my fragile anarchies. they are my stars. they are my explosions. they need their own anarchies. they need to not be fragile anymore.” link had screamed into his sobs.
✩
“we need that ‘good reason,’ lincoln. you need it too. we’ll cross the anger bridge when we come to it.” she punctuated it with a sigh. her job must be hard, lincoln thinks with a tad of remorse. but he’s felt too much to act on it.
“i was starting my own fragile little anarchy.”
“that’s not an answer.”
✩
he was there, at rose’s headstone, in the morning. the morning part wasn’t entirely new, but it was fresh. the newest thing here was the sharpie one the shiny, polished stone, and rung alarms in link’s head.
just a word. he shouldn’t be too angry about it. but it started with an f. it had two gs. he didn’t read the entire word, though, because he was speed walking away.
he was simmering in the tiled halls. shoulders on fire and heart encased in ice. then he hears it.
“what a fa***t. just like his brother.”
link turned.
it shouldn’t make him this angry.
he walked, right there, punching distance from a beautiful person with sweeping, light brown hair and crystal eyes. he only smiled, albeit a little surprised, when link spoke.
“his name is roosevelt.” he said. and then he swung.
neel’s friends didn’t do a thing. they had their phone’s out, camera apps lighting the screen. and link was going at it. he had no strategy, but it’s hard to combat a kicking, punching, anger blinded kid even if he’s a good couple inches shorter and a couple pounds thinner.
his clothes got ripped, his hair was pulled, he’s lip was bleeding and he couldn’t feel his face but he knew it was bloody, but when he stood up neel could barely groan and the crowd that had formed looked vaguely terrified of the looming boy, anger pooling his sense.
he punched the wall nearby. he didn’t stop until he felt it.
link walked himself into the principal’s office.
✩
“do you have any siblings?” link asked, already feeling himself choke, knowing he was going to cry again. he’d stayed chill for record time.
“yes.” the principal said carefully.
“have you ever visited one of their gravestones?”
“...no, i have not.”
link thought, for two sharp seconds, that he must look terrifying; talking quietly with his head down, about the one tragedy of his lifetime.
“so you’ve never seen their gravestone vandalized?” he looked up then.
“is this what this is about?”
a soft, barely there stream pulsed through his head as a glow of anger reared in his stomach.
“no.” is what he said. he took a deep breath, as he did right before performances. “my brother’s last words mentioned something called a fragile anarchy. i’ve been trying to find the meaning, and i think i did.” another, deep deep breath. “don’t get me wrong. neel called my brother and i a slur, and i gave what he had coming. instead of putting “anger issues” in my folder put “homophobic, probably racist butthole” in his.” lincoln didn’t miss the quirk of a smile.
“you really just had to tell me that, you know? i can clear it on validation of hate speech. just... know yourself, lincoln. a punch doesn’t make a fragile anarchy. i knew roosevelt enough to know that.”
know that from a sandy coloured folder? whispered a corner of his brain.
but he knew his principal was right.
link had figured out his fragile sort of anarchy. he’d put a wobbly sort of definition under its name.
“it’s not punching.” he said to the air, later in the parking lot with pepe beside him.
"keep it.” she said, even though she knew very well he wasn’t talking directly to her. “make it strong.”

Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would say a scientist, a doctor, or a bulldozer driver. : )
As you can tell by the fact I've posted on here 3 times now, I kind of miss my past. Not that my life is bad now. It's pretty good. But there's so much I've lost . . .

i want the scritch-scratch of pencil on paper.
i want it now. i want it all the time.
i want the thin lines by my own hand
twisting into a flower, a bird, a face;
your face
i want music.
i want plucked strings beneath calloused fingers.
i want freedom to sing as i want
when i want
i want to sing now
i want to sing now, with intermingling voices of someone i love.
your voice beside mine
i want coffee in the morning.
perfume freshness and warm, clean steam.
i want the flowers on our kitchen table
and click-clack dog feet on the wood.
i want to share this with you.
i want bird-song in our ears.
i want warm hillsides.
i want the breeze in our hair.
i haven't met you yet, but i want these things with you.

for my midterm im heavily revising a poem (and ofc i picked the fucking 96-line one) and im supposed to do a few experiments with it and the first one i did was pretty sick i think? like it's just 'tack on 50 lines' but the stream-of-consciousness result was neat i guess i figured id share bc maybe yall would want to try it too lmao
without further ado here's 146 lines of bullshit
ode to the visible universe experiment.docx

She awakens half in the surf, craggy rocks digging painfully into her spine. Fluid fills her lungs and she turn to vomit into the water, salt stinging her throat and bleeding through her eyes. She stays that way for a while, fog-eyed and gasping.
“Ah, you’re awake,” says a voice, and she turns frantically towards its source. It’s a woman, perched on the rocks, or at least something that vaguely resembles a woman. She is low in a squat, spine curved and elbows resting on her knees. She is naked, and the girl averts her eyes but not before she notices the feathers covering the creature’s body and the curling talons that are her feet.
A siren.
“Am I dead?” asks the girl, and her voice is scratchy like the rocks against her skin. The siren’s orange eyes light up with amusement, and her laugh is like the waves and the song of a seashell pressed to one’s ear.
“No,” she says. “Just a bit drowned. You’ll live.”
“Oh,” says the girl, for lack of better words. “Good.”
The siren smiles with lips like blood. She’s beautiful, in a strange, monstrous way, stunning in her hideousness and compelling in her inhumanity. The girl finds herself staring and turn back out towards the sea.
“Why am I not dead?” she says to the waves. “I thought that’s what your job was. To lure in and kill seafarers who stray too close.”
“Ah,” says the siren. “Caught that, did you. Well, tell me. How do we lure you in?”
“With your song,” she replies, without hesitation. “You sing into the minds of sailors and fill the imagination with the thing we long for most.”
The siren nods, smile still sticking to the corners of her mouth. “And then we twist it at the last moment, and break it upon the rocks. Now tell me, my dear, what is it that you most long for?”
The girl frowns into the surf. A fish splashes above the water, silver scales flashing like gems and fins fanning out like wings for just a moment before disappearing once more into the waves.
She thinks of a dark, musty hold and wrists rubbed raw. She thinks of jeering laughter and words that cut like knives.
“Freedom,” she says. Then she casts her eyes about the spire of rock that she sits on, too small to be an island, and feels her heart sink like the ship had last night. “Then is this—”
“An illusion?” says the siren. “Not in the sense you are thinking. But in some ways, yes. You are free now, from that ship and those men. But have you truly gained your freedom?”
The girl thinks for a moment. At first glance, yes, she is free; her shackles are gone and her captors dead. She can do whatever she chooses, now, but she has merely departed one prison for another; the island is very small and she is without a boat.
She is still caged.
“No,” she says, and her voice breaks like seashells beneath heavy boots. “No, I am not free.”
The siren’s smile widens. “And so the dream has shattered. That is my goal, yes?”
The girl nods. At least she’s not dead.
“What do I do?” she wonders aloud. She’s not expecting an answer but she receives one regardless.
“Whatever you want,” says the siren, and then departs in a breeze of feathers.
The girl pulls her knees tight to her chest and gives herself space to cry. She cries until her eyes are clear of ocean brine and her lungs are empty of cigarette smoke. She cries until her blood runs free of mold.
When she is done she takes a deep breath and clambers to her feet. She is unbalanced on the rocks, but she does her best to steady herself.
Her clothes are already tattered so she pulls them off and releases them to the sea. Then, bare feet rough against the rocks, she follows the siren to the top of the island.
There’s a message to be learned here, she thinks, about how the sirens came to be.
At the top of the island the siren is waiting. Her eyes are sparkling like so many stars and her lips are still an upwards crescent.
“Have you decided?” she asks.
The girl nods, hair lashing at her cheeks and skin prickling in the coolness of the sea wind. There’s a freeness to this, standing naked before the elements, surrounded by blue on all sides. There’s a freeness to this, and isn’t freedom what she’s wanted for so long?
“I want you to teach me,” she says to the smiling siren, bare and feathered and old as the rocks below their feet. “I want you to teach me how to sing.”

there's something sacred in our conversations.
something special.
her and me, we're one.
we've always been one.
the first time we met i made her cry
but every time since has been full of laughter.
i thought i loved her,
and i do.
(not like that.)
(like that.)
she's my sister
if not by blood than by choice,
my soulmate through everything.
'hey look at this stupid drawing i did'
'nice'
or
'i want to tell you that i'm bi. i never have. i am now.'
'alright. i love you.'
we're growing up.
that's frightening, isn't it? growing up.
there's no greater horror movie than stepping onto a college campus and thinking,
i could spend my next four years here.
(that's a lie.
there's no greater horror movie than the thought that all your friends will slip away.)
i don't want to lose you.
i don't want to lose our midnight conversations,
our constant support and intertwined hearts.
sometimes we cry together.
(we cry for the children we are slowly ceasing to be.)
other times we laugh.
(we laugh for our futures.)
there's something sacred in it.
it's the kind of trust like none other
it's every thought shared
it's always winning hearts when we play as a team
it's laughing at some inside joke.
it's her hand in mine when we walk down the street,
or her heart beating fast inside my ribcage.
(i wish everyone could experience this religion.)

About CICADA

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